Abstract
The success of production from unconventionals in North America, encourage Kuwait to focus on Najmah Kerogen and unconventional resources that have value of significant hydrocarbon resource potential in North Kuwait Jurassic Area. Kuwait Oil Company has embarked on a journey to unlock these unconventional resources by screening the subsurface targets in the reservoirs which have potential to contribute to the gas production ambitions of the country. Unconventional field development team has evaluated these difficult reservoirs through an End To End (E2E) hydrocarbon maturation (HCM) framework, with a clear roadmap to appraise and develop these resources to sustain the required plateau of the unique Gas Asset in Kuwait.
The reservoirs of focus are a mix of naturally fractured carbonates with conventional "Middle Marat (MM)" reservoirs and tight unconventional reservoirs ("Najmah/Sargelu"&"Kerogen") at a depth of 15000+ ft in a HPHT setting. The E2E-HCM Modules have been used as key building blocks for the economic evaluations. The modules can be flexibly combined as needed to model the economic potential of each of the Common Value Areas (CVAs), where a CVA is defined as an area that has been demonstrated to have common economic metrics based on Play-Based Exploration (PBE), infrastructure, and field development characteristics.
Aggregating modelling tools (eg Proviso), using decline curves of 23 conventional volatile oil and gas condensate reservoirs (3D simulation) and five unconventional reservoirs have been used. Long term production forecast is generated by combining these simulation results and flowing through 8 production facilities. An optimized drilling sequence of 500+ wells is worked-out to achieve this production forecast. This exercise also facilitated in screening potential targets for further drilling for meeting and sustaining the promised gas production plateau. In this paper, the methodology and workflow used for unlocking the potential of conventional and unconventional resources of north Kuwait Jurassic reservoirs is highlighted.
